


Lost in Space

by forgetcanon



Series: Fully Informed / MIA Walters [4]
Category: Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: Gen, MIA Walters, RP Verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 15:56:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/737480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgetcanon/pseuds/forgetcanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lost in Space, a prelude to the MIA Walters. Natalia and Peter wake up in abandoned manor in the middle of space, with nothing to do but hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost in Space

Natalia's phone was so much dead plastic, none of the lights turned on, and the omnipresent glow of the Walter Manor was dimmed to a mere shimmer as she passed by each window. After four months as a frequent visitor she was still unsure about the Walter Manor's floor plan, so she kept her hand on the wall as she walked. She should know the way from the library to the front door well enough, but she had already taken a few wrong turns before finding this wall lined with windows.

So yes, she was terrified. But Natalia was going to be a psychologist, and she knew all the little lies she could tell herself to keep from panicking. She was working down a list of them.

' _I'll panic once I've found The Spine because he'll have some idea of what to do next_ ,' she thought as she found the main staircase. She looked both ways before descending, as had become her habit after that one time Rabbit came sliding down the rails on a skateboard. 

The Walter Rendesvouz Point in Case of Blue Matter Incident was the entrance hall, "Because right after we get everyone together it's probably best to run." She was the first one there. Turning in a slow circle to verify that, yes, no one else was hiding in one of the side-halls as a prank, she frowned. The architecture was off.The stairs were different, more spindly and lacking the steel bumps Wanda had welded into the rails. The doorways were taller and more ornate than usual. Even the walls appeared to be painted a slightly different color, underneath the creepy animal pictures.

It looked like the Walter manor, but only in the way that your cousins looked like you from a distance if the observer didn't know you too well.

She faced the front doorway. Usually, it showed a somewhat shadowy version of what was outside, as though a light film of shadow lay over it. Now, it shimmered like a gossamer curtain, and what it showed wasn't a gravel driveway. It showed an attic, a hallway, a tree in a wasteland, a desert. She stumbled to a window to see if it matched, but the windows showed nothing but darkness, starting a foot away from the walls. Pitch blackness. She wondered if it would be solid if she touched it, or if it was just empty space.

"What," she said, leaning against the wall. "What, what the actual fuck."

Today was one of those days where she had to reevaluate her life choices, because was being in love with pretty much her perfect match worth shit like this happening?

 _'Probably_ ,' she thought. ' _It just doesn't seem that way right now because I am terrified. Unless it actually isn't worth it and I'm just using my terror to justify- no, no, I'll think about this later. Right now isn't the right time to be making judgement calls. I'm about a second away from having hysterics_.'

Natalia sat against the wall and decided to have her hysterics while waiting for a familar face to show up. 

\--

Twenty minutes later, she tried in vain to turn her phone on again. Absolutely nothing happened.

She flipped the light switches again. Absolutely nothing happened.

She drew spirals in her notebook, made a list of reasons she liked The Spine and his family, made a list of things that would not help her situation, and broke her pencil. Nothing continued to happen.

She cried again, for good measure, despite the fact that 'crying more' was on the list of things that wouldn't help her situation.

She wrote "Natalia was here for about an hour, went to get water from the main kitchen" on her notebook and left it propped up on her purse in the middle of the hall. When she came back with a jug of water and several cups, it was exactly where she left it. She turned the page, wrote that she was going for food, got food, and returned.

She turned the page, realized that she was pretty quickly falling into a pattern that reeked of insanity, and just wrote "I'm in the West Living Room with food and water -Natalia." That page was the only thing she left as she moved to a more comfortable place.

"I am not going to completely lose my mind," she said out loud, "until at least a day has gone by."

She didn't have a watch.

\--

fridge - does not work  
microwave - does not work  
flashlight found in Emergency Kit in Kitchen - works. I am going to punch Wanda for not telling me that they had those, even though it's pretty obvious that they would.  
Water - works  
Hot water - works  
Plumbing in general - works  
HOW in general - does not work

found Emergency Kits in pretty much every room. had chargers for everything really. would be useful to check if phone could be turned on if there was power.

update: the little plug-looking thing in each emergency kit is a portable 112V power source. duh. wish i had these back home.

phone is charging, works fine, no signal. must resist urge to play subway surfers until I either unlock Yutani or lose my mind. Time established: 9:14 PM. Event happened around 5:00ish.

everything here is super sleek. feel like i'm living in steve job's wet dream.

contemplating making map of new walter manor. that would probably only end in me getting lost, as i have no map-bulding experience. will try to locate useful locations however. nothing else to do.

\--

Natalia spent two days alone. She found the Walter pantry, which was full of enough canned food to keep her alive for as long as she wanted to eat it, not to mention flour, sugar, and pretty much everything else that didn't need to be temperature controlled. She found out that the oven and the stove actually worked, something she hadn't thought to check before. She found a bedroom that she was pretty sure was Wanda's, found another bedroom that she was pretty sure was Wanda's, and stole clothing from the one closer to the living room. She found a series of pictures down what seemed to be the central hallway. Bizarrely, there were nine Peter Walters. Most of them had faces. The bots were in all of them.

She leaned in close, trying to shine her flashlight through the glass frames in such a way that she could study the changes in The Spine over the years. 

Far away, there was a resounding thud, the only noise that she hadn't caused herself for 48 hours. With a squeak she leaped back from the wall, her heart knocking furiously against her ribcage.

A far off whirring started. The air in the hallway moved, becoming sour and clogged with dust. The lights buzzed to life, an alarm clock went off, and this dead version of the Walter manor lumbered back to life. Natalia ran for a familiar space, ending up in the kitchen.

After half an hour, the air cleared and began to cool. Air conditioning. Lights turned on and off when Natalia tried the switches. The microwave flashed 00:00. When she went to the HOW, QWERTY wouldn't respond but her screen was on.

On the way back to her living room to see if she could turn on the TV in there, she passed through the entrance hall. Peter Walter VI was there, holding the page she had torn out of her notebook.

"Oh," he said, waving it at her. "Hello. Got any of that water here? I'm about to pass out."

\--

Peter didn't pass out as he had threatened to, but he drank almost a full jug and worked his way though three cans of macaroni before Natalia hinted that he should probably slow down.

"Right," he said. "Sorry. So, what do you know?"

"About...?" Natalia asked.

Peter gestured at the house. "Our situation. Sorry, I just like to get everyone else's information before I give mine because I'm probably going to have a lot more and you'll forget yours."

Natalia shrugged. "Alright. Well, this isn't the Manor I'm used to, there's a bunch of pictures upstairs that hint at there being nine Peter Walters, all of the stuff here is incredibly high-tech, the windows look out onto inky blackness, and the front door appears to be a portal to other dimensions."

Peter tilted his head to the side. "Yeah, I saw that. That's weird. Well, here's what I know.

"I was down in the lab testing out my Space Machine- like a Time Machine only it travels in Space with a minimal of travelling in Time-"

"Why don't you just call it a teleporter?" Natalia asked.

"Boring," Peter said. "Anyways, I was testing that with a bunch of mice when it overloaded and I passed out. Woke up alone, power down, nobody was screaming and coming to get me so I assumed that everything was more or less alright. I went to turn on the generator, but it was all dusty and not even the right generator, so I cleaned that off and had to figure out how it even worked before I could get it going, and then I came out here and found you."

"So your Space machine may or may not have flung us into the future?" Natalia asked.

Peter shrugged. "That's one hypothesis. There's also alternate dimensions, pocket universes, doomed timelines. I'll be able to rule some of them out by looking through a family album. What was that you said about the windows looking out onto inky blackness?"

Natalia gestured. "Inky blackness. I opened a window earlier and poked it. It's... gooey. Like pudding."

"Like pudding," Peter said thoughtfully, getting to his feet and peering out. "Well, at least we aren't in the 8th Dimension."

"Hooray," Natalia said, waving her hand like an imaginary flag. "I'm not sure where that is, but it doesn't sound like fun."

"It really isn't," Peter said, turning back around. "Now, I have something of a plan, but I think I'm actually going to pass out unless I get some sleep, so can you wait to hear it?"

Natalia got up, waving at the nest of blankets and pillows she left behind. "Have at it."

He lay on his stomach and almost immediately seemed to be asleep. Natalia played with her phone awkwardly for as long as she could handle, before pouring the last of the water into a cup for him and leaving to refill it.  
   
When she came back he had taken off his mask but still had his face buried in the pillow, his breathing still abnormally steady. She left the water and a note- 'I'll hang around the kitchen for a bit.'

\--

Peter found an electronic whiteboard that responded to voice commands, and wrote out a list of hypotheses.

"So, we're probably in an offshoot of a doomed timeline of an alternate universe," he concluded, "Going by the goo outside and the pictures and the alternate history this place seems to have."

"Yay," Natalia said. “That's nice. I have no idea what that means. Any idea on how to get home?"

Peter thought about it, tapping the end of his stylus against his mask. "Well, yes, several. But since you're here, I think we have a problem. No, no, the problem isn't you being here, I definitely prefer you being here to being alone, it's just a symptom of a bigger issue."

Natalia nodded. "And the issue is?"

"Where's everyone else?" he asked. "You were in the library on the third floor, and if the Event just grabbed everyone in a certain radius and tossed them into this place, we'd at least have The Spine, who was in the HOW at the time, not to mention pretty much everyone else in the house. So. For some reason, either it only grabbed you and I, or it only chose to throw you and I into the same place and everyone else is... elsewhere."

Natalia frowned. "What would make it grab only you and me?"

Peter shrugged. "If this was made by something sentient, I'd say age. We're the youngest two people in the house by at least thirty years or so. But I think it's blue matter contamination."

Natalia tried not to gesture at his mask, but then figured, hell, he's a scientist. She gestured at his mask. "You've lost me there."

Peter huffed. "Yes, well. For some reason, I don't read as having any blue matter in me, at all, despite having taken a whole lot of it to the face. It just goes right through me. You should only have trace amounts of it, because you don't actually spend all that much time here and you haven't been exposed to any... _shenanigans_ , before now. So, we both woke up in pretty much the same places as we were, and everyone else is mysteriously missing.

Natalia could put two and two together. "We need to find them before we can even think about getting home."

Peter nodded. "Pretty much."

"And there's no guarantee that we'll find them at all."

Peter hesitated, and when he spoke, his voice was less composed. "Well. No. I suppose there isn't."

Natalia immediately felt horrible. Yes, it could be said that she wouldn't be in this mess if it weren't for his experiment, but that didn't mean it was his fault, and it definitely didn't mean she should blame him. He was more attached to the people they were missing than she was. His mother and father were missing, not to mention his uncles and aunt. She stood, putting her arm around him.

"Hey. We'll find them. Blue Matter Bullshit usually sorts itself out with a little help, right?"

Peter shrugged. A tiny gesture. "Most of the time, yes."

Neither of them mentioned that Peter didn't have much of a face anymore. Neither of them mentioned 1950.

"So," Natalia said, rubbing his arm brusquely before removing herself from his personal space. "I've been pretty much all over this version of the manor over the last few days, and I haven't seen any sign of anyone else being here. If they're anywhere, they're through the front door."

"Through the front door," Peter agreed. "Bring your notebook."


End file.
